• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.44-54
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• 2005

Most advanced countries in GIS field have established and managed georeferenced socioeconomic data systematically and made a great profit on various social and economic areas. In Korea, however, socioeconomic geographical information is relatively poor compared to systems related to geographical and topographical features. This is mainly due to the characteristics of the process from the construction to the utilization of socioeconomic data. That is, from the stage of data construction, socioeconomic data require solutions for frequent changes compared to data on geographical and topographical features and, because of difficulties in marking the positions of individual entities, information is built up through setting appropriate spatial units of aggregation. In the stage of data utilization, the data often need to be combined with other types of socioeconomic data due to the complexity of socioeconomic phenomena. Thus, the this study examined usability of GIS in socioeconomic fields and the spatial dimension of socioeconomic information through representative cases of GIS in developed countries and, based on the results, derived data requirements for socioeconomic GIS found in the construction and utilization of data and proposed solutions for the requirements.